The US Supreme Court this week once again bestowed citizenship on American corporations.

A few years back, with the Citizens United decision, the high court declared corporations were essentially people and therefore had First Amendment rights to pump any amount of money they want into election campaigns. Now in the so-called Hobby Lobby case, it declared that corporations could have religious rights as well, and therefore don't have to include contraceptives in their health insurance plans if the principal owners' faith opposes it.

So while the nation's high court is on a roll granting corporations personhood, it would be nice if the corporations themselves started acting like good citizens and, for example, paid their taxes like everyone else does.

The latest American corporation that is considering moving its headquarters overseas so it can pay lower taxes on its profits is none other than drugstore giant Walgreens. It would be the latest in a line of US companies that don't like to pay their fair share of taxes even though they owe much of their success to government programs and infrastructure that were provided by other American taxpayers over the years.

Ukraine's gas bill has risen another $838 million, after Kiev failed to make a payment for 1.7 billion cubic meters of Russian gas supplied in the first half of June.

"The deadline for paying June bills expired yesterday; we again didn't receive the money from Naftogaz Ukraine. As a result Ukraine's debt to Gazprom for the 1.7 billion cubic meters supplied from June 1 through June 16 rose to $5.296 billion," Gazprom CEO Aleksey Miller said on Tuesday.

Miller added that Ukraine needs to pay for 11.535 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, which is a "gigantic" volume, comparable to the total supplied to Poland.

"Ukraine's principle unwillingness to pay for Russian gas is becoming chronic, and once again shows the transition to a prepayment system, included in the contract, was the only correct decision," Miller added.

The new bill is calculated on a price of $485 per thousand cubic meters that came into effect in April.

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself...Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable." - H.L. Mencken, American journalist

It's vogue, trendy and appropriate to look to dystopian literature as a harbinger of what we're experiencing at the hands of the government. Certainly, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm have much to say about government tyranny, corruption, and control, as does Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Philip K. Dick's Minority Report. Yet there are also older, simpler, more timeless stories - folk tales and fairy tales - that speak just as powerfully to the follies and foibles in our nature as citizens and rulers alike that give rise to tyrants and dictatorships.

One such tale, Hans Christian Andersen's fable of the Emperor's New Clothes, is a perfect paradigm of life today in the fiefdom that is the American police state, only instead of an imperial president spending money wantonly on lavish vacations, entertainment, and questionable government programs aimed at amassing greater power, Andersen presents us with a vain and thoughtless emperor, concerned only with satisfying his own needs at the expense of his people, even when it means taxing them unmercifully, bankrupting his kingdom, and harshly punishing his people for daring to challenge his edicts.

For those unfamiliar with the tale, the Emperor, a vain peacock of a man, is conned into buying a prohibitively expensive suit of clothes that is supposedly visible only to those who are smart, competent and well-suited to their positions. Surrounded by yes men, professional flatterers and career politicians who fawn, simper and genuflect, the Emperor - arrogant, pompous and oblivious to his nudity - prances through the town in his new suit of clothes until a child dares to voice what everyone else has been thinking but too afraid to say lest they be thought stupid or incompetent: "He isn't wearing anything at all!"

A child at the centre of the alleged Westminster paedophile ring in the 1980s has been traced by police and may be 'ready to spill the beans' about the politician he says abused him, it emerged today.

The unnamed man, who is now in his 40s, says he was attacked by a senior political figure when he was eight and knew then he worked in the 'big house' - a reference to the Houses of Parliament.

Scotland Yard has traced the alleged victim, who is a successful entrepreneur based in the United States but he has yet to make a formal statement to police.

But detectives have traced a copy of a statement he made more than 30 years ago when he was rescued from the abuse.

During his interview in 1982, the child said his abuser worked in 'the big house', which detectives believe refers to the Houses of Parliament.

The man subjected him to a horrific sexual assault and police working on the case at the time, who interviewed him, are said to have corroborated some of his evidence.

Western support will allow more IMF and European lending to prop the Ukrainian currency so the Ukrainian oligarchs can move their money safely to British and US banks, economist and author Michael Hudson told RT's Truthseeker.

RT: Could you summarize for us the tried and tested steps that will lead from IMF loans, to Ukraine's best assets ending up in private Western hands - the IMF's 'knee-breaker' role as you memorably described it as?

Michael Hudson: The basic principle to bear in mind is that finance today is war by non-military means. The aim of getting a country in debt is to obtain its economic surplus, ending up with its property. The main property to obtain is that which can produce exports and generate foreign exchange. For Ukraine, this means mainly the Eastern manufacturing and mining companies, which presently are held in the hands of the oligarchs. For foreign investors, the problem is how to transfer these assets and their revenue into foreign hands - in an economy whose international payments are in chronic deficit as a result of the failed post-1991 restructuring. That is where the IMF comes in.

The IMF was not set up to finance domestic government budget deficits. Its loans are earmarked to pay foreign creditors, mainly to maintain a country's exchange rate. The effect usually is to subsidize flight capital out of the country - at a high exchange rate rather than depositors and creditors getting fewer dollars or euro. In Ukraine's case, foreign creditors would include Gazprom, which already has been paid something. The IMF transfers a credit to its "Ukraine account," which then pays foreign creditors. The money never really gets to Ukraine or to other IMF borrowers. It is paid to the accounts of foreigners, including foreign government creditors, as in IMF loans to Greece. Such loans come with "conditionalities" that impose austerity. This in turn drives the economy even further into debt - forcing the government to tighten the budget even more, run even smaller budget deficits and sell off public assets.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon informed Security Council members on Monday that two cylinders reportedly seized by Syrian government forces in an opposition-held region appeared to contain the deadly nerve agent sarin.

According to the letter dispatched by Ban to the UNSC, on June 14 the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) analyzed the contents of the barrels, reported Reuters. The UN Joint Mission is currently overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles under the umbrella of the OPCW.

Syria has declared a total of 1,300 tons of chemical agents, and handed over the last portion of its stockpile on June 23 under the agreement reached in September.

"The Joint Mission confirmed that these contained sarin," read Ban's letter. The Syrian government declared the barrels "as abandoned chemical weapons," which were reportedly seized by government forces in August 2013 within an area under the control of armed rebel groups.

Russia will not shy away from international parliamentary cooperation and will continue other forms of collaboration with the world, because no one is currently interested in the country's isolation, the Upper House chair has said.

The return of the "Iron Curtain" is out of question in the modern world, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said at a major press conference on Tuesday. "There are many reasons for this. Neither the world is interested in Russia's isolation, nor is Russia interested in such scenario," she noted, adding that "the world has become global."

Matviyenko also said that by maintaining membership in international parliamentary bodies and panels, Russia would retain the possibility of telling other nations about its position and back it with arguments.

The International Monetary Fund appears to believe economic momentum has slackened since the publication of its latest "World Economic Outlook" report in April, based on comments made by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde in a speech at the annual Davos in Provence meeting in France Sunday.

"We are seeing global activity pick up, but the momentum could be less robust than expected because potential growth is weaker [and] investment remains lackluster," Lagarde was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. In its most recent "WEO" report, the IMF forecast global growth could rise from 3 percent in 2013 to 3.6 percent in 2014 to 3.9 percent in 2015. Its chief apparently did not indicate in her speech the size of the hinted downward revision(s) in her organization's overall projections.

However, Lagarde did estimate China's economic growth would be between 7 percent and 7.5 percent this year, according to Reuters. In April, the IMF's comparable figure was 7.5 percent, which would suggest its outlook for the world's second-largest economy has darkened by as much as 50 basis points since then.

"Despite the many responses to the [global financial] crisis ... recovery is modest, laborious, fragile -- and measures to boost demand, despite the goodwill of central banks, will find their limits," Lagarde said at the meeting in Aix-en-Provence. "We must therefore take steps to boost efforts to strengthen growth."

Acknowledging the need in a number of countries to relaunch their investments, Lagarde warned it should be done "without threatening the viability of public finances." She was clear that increased public investments were currently options not for all nations but for some of them, Reuters reported.

In the U.S., she indicated, growth should accelerate as long as the Federal Reserve's move from looser to tighter monetary policy is orderly and there is a precise intermediate-term budget framework.

In the euro area, she suggested, the 18-member bloc is slowly coming out of recession and it is crucial that those countries continue to carry out reforms, including completing the banking union.

The IMF could promulgate the next update of its global economic outlook as soon as this month.

A Russian MP claims the US kidnapped his son from the Maldives on bogus cyber-fraud charges and may be preparing to offer him as bait in a swap deal for Edward Snowden.

Roman Seleznyov, 30, was arrested at Male international airport as he was about to board a flight to Moscow. He was forced by US secret service agents to board a private plane to Guam and was later arrested. The Russian ministry slammed his detention as "a de-facto kidnapping."

Moscow considers the kidnapping "a new hostile move by Washington," and accused the US of ignoring proper procedure in dealing with foreign nationals suspected of crimes.

"The same happened to Viktor Bout and Konstantin Yaroshenko, who were forced to go to the US from third countries and convicted on dubious charges."

US authorities have begun to negotiate with Germany's Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank over their dealings with countries blacklisted by American government. That is another crackdown on European banks who are not happy with the US sanctions policy. The talks with state and federal authorities have just begun, a source said, however, the timing of a deal is not set, Reuters reports.

Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank coul not be reached to comment on the allegations.

Washington has pushed European banks which have found ways to evade their sanctions, imposing a record fine on France's BNP Paribas last week and stoking resentment among bankers and officials at what they see as American imperialism.

Commerzbank, Germany's second-largest lender, is 17 percent owned by the German government and the settlement talks could further cool bilateral relations between Berlin and Washington, which are already worsened due to bulj surveillance scandals.

Commerzbank is accused by US authorities of transferring money through its American operations on behalf of companies in Iran and Sudan (which America sees as the so-called "failed states") and could pay at least $500 million in penalties, the New York Times reports.